


We Were Amateurs at War

by theradiointukyshead



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - All the Light We Cannot See, Alternate Universe - World War II, Bombing, F/M, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-11
Updated: 2015-03-20
Packaged: 2018-03-17 01:52:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 10,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3510770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theradiointukyshead/pseuds/theradiointukyshead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Fitz and his neighbor Skye discover an old radio, he is enamored by a weekly science broadcast from an unknown little girl with fire for a heart. Cities away, Simmons sits in her father’s attic, and - with the help of a museum curator named May - creates her own radio show. The story follows both of them from the lonely years of their childhood, to the very last night of London Blitz, where their lives finally converge for the first time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prelude

**London, May 1941**

They came just shy of midnight, flocks after flocks of metal birds heavy with the weight they bore, and they tore apart the sky as they dropped lower, like a final deep breath before the grand finale. Their noses dipped and their tails rose, the swastika insignia gleaming under cold starlight, as London drew closer underneath. The pitch black city lied still, its belly upturned, ragged and tired as it waited in resignation for the bombs to rain.

Somewhere on the empty streets, a boy was running. His lungs were on fire and his eyes burned with sweat. _Private Fitz, I command you to stop_ , echoed a voice, but it was easy to tune it out when his mind was playing a melody on repeat.

A few blocks away, a girl sat by her window with her violin tucked between her chin and shoulder. Each note she played drifted lazily into the darkness, up to the sky where it got lost amidst the roar of Luftwaffe planes.


	2. Longing in Spring

**Glasgow, 1933**

Fitz was eleven when they converted the house next door to an orphanage. They tore the wallpaper down to paint over everything a dull beige, and they rolled the carpet up, baring wooden planks that creaked every time the orphans chased each other on their dirt-smeared feet. He hated the whole ordeal, but at least they had the decency to throw together a little swing that hung from a tree on the shared front yard.

“A bit childish, if you asked me,” a girl commented to him, her little grimace filled with indignation only an eight-year-old could muster, as he stood eyeing the swing.

The matrons called her Mary Sue Poots, but she smacked him with a broom when he repeated after them, insisting on being called Skye instead. As for him, he referred to himself as Fitz, but one late afternoon when his mother poked her head out of the door and demanded him home for supper, she let slip the name Leopold, and from that point on Skye refused to call him anything but.

She was the pestering sister he never had, the one he could strangle to death with adoration. Whenever he wasn’t in school, they spent most of their time in the orphanage, sheltered from screeching children in the enclosed shoebox basement, taking things apart and putting them back together. He taught her how the laws of physics governed the world, how to tinker with broken compasses, pocket watches, old phonographs, whatever it was they found discarded by the dumpster. She in turn taught him her system of coding in the language of the street, all the intricate ways to coax for a muffin if the baker was in a good mood or to steal if he wasn’t. When the food dwindled and adults muttered words like “depression” and “unemployment,” he sneaked her stale black bread and she gave him water-based potato soup in exchange.

“Do you think things will get better, Leopold?” she asked. They were in the park, watching pigeons take flight, and he was doodling different ways the mechanism of their wings could be used on his paper airplanes.

“Of course,” he said absentmindedly.

Skye nodded, but she was unsatisfied. A pigeon landed by her feet, tilted its head, before taking off again into the cloudy day. “At least promise me you’ll always be my big brother?” she whispered, and for the first time, she was without her mischievous vivacity.

He looked up from his sketch and gave her a boyish grin. “Always.”

 

**Sheffield, 1934**

Simmons grew up in a little cottage up the hill on the outskirts of town, nestled in the heart of her mother’s garden where columbine and Siberian iris lined the gravel path, their violet and dark blue splashing on the backdrop of vine-covered walls. Her less tremulous years of childhood were a time of colors, of muddy feet and fingernails caked with soil. Her mother often found her poking at worms by the fences, or watching tadpoles in their tiny pond swim against the ripple, so bizarre was her concentration that she was a bit afraid to interrupt.

On the roof was a chimney that rarely puffed smoke, where her father housed the antenna for his makeshift radio transmitter. He travelled back and forth between Sheffield and London, but when he was at home, his broadcasts were still sporadic and they never held her interest. She often wondered what he did for a living, and he would respond with a ruffle of hair and a flutter of newspaper. Eventually, she stopped asking.

That said, Simmons adored her father. He was one of the few people who understood her fascination with the world. Every other week, he would take her to London. They took the train, always in first class, and he told her about life passing by beyond the window, about the mountains and moorlands that were eternally green.

The museum of natural history they always visited in London was founded by a woman named Peggy Carter. At the break of dawn, he left her in the care of May, the curator, before disappearing into Director Coulson’s office until the sun set.

May was a woman of few words, but she harbored a love and patience for Simmons that rendered words superfluous anyway. Simmons trailed behind her while she worked, bringing her insatiable curiosity from the closed quarter where May did her research, the hall lined with taxidermied mammals, to the gallery displaying the Earth’s timeline. Her questions were incessant, untiring, and she tugged at the hem of May’s shirt until she got her answers. May always began with a long-suffering sigh, but once she got to explaining, she was thorough, and her lips twitched as she watched the child furiously jot down everything on her little notebook.

One morning, Simmons found a strange-looking rock in her garden, and on her next trip to London, she brought it to May.

“This,” the curator announced, holding the tar-black object the size of a child’s fist to the late afternoon light streaming in from their second-story window, “is a meteorite.”

Simmons took it back and examined it, nimble fingers tracing along its rough surface.

“Most meteoroids can’t survive the interaction with atmospheric gases,” May observed while she marveled at the exhibit. “But this one made it. That’s why we call it a meteorite. It’s a hard-earned title, like Doctor or Professor, don’t you think? To plunge into the unknown and not disappear in a flurry of fire and smoke.”

“Amazing,” she breathed. “Galaxies away, and somehow it came into the Earth’s orbit. Somehow it found its way to us.”

“People find stray meteorites all the time, Jemma.”

“Not me, and not this particular meteorite,” her lower lip jutted out, defiant. “In the grand scheme of things, yes, it is nothing. But out of all the people who have existed and will exist at some point, it still found me, and I choose it. And that alone is a miracle.”

May just shook her head and allowed one rare chuckle. “You might as well broadcast it on one of your father’s radio shows. God knows we could all use the exuberance of youth in our lives.”

She was joking, of course, but Simmons took it to heart. And so, after a month of cajoling, she finally got her father to relent. Once a week, he let her into the attic where he kept his equipment, and for half an hour in the late evening, she would sit by the dormer window, cocooned inside its nook, with notes scattered across her lap

For the most part, she talked about science, what she had discovered in the London museum, in class, and in her mother’s sun-streaked garden. Her voice was soft, as every little girl’s voice ought to be, but the cadence in it held embers and sparks. She had no idea if anyone was listening, but she kept on talking. It simply wasn’t enough to learn; she desired to share, and if she didn’t speak up she was afraid the knowledge would swallow her whole.

At the end of each broadcast, she would conclude with her violin poised on her shoulder, bowing away without sheet music. She didn’t need one anyway; it was an instrumental piece her father used to play all the time around the house for her mother. Simmons fell in love with _Ständchen_ , though its melancholic undertone sometimes made her question its apparent serenity. Her father said Schubert poured a lifetime’s worth of regret for years unlived into his very last song cycle. She was too young to fully understand that, but she knew she would not want to pass away at thirty-one when there were still more knowledge to learn, places to see, people to meet. So for now, she emptied her everything into the music.

 _This is who I am. This is who you are. And we are meant to be alive._ The words she wanted to shout tied themselves into each note and floated away, to the waiting ears of anyone who would listen.

 

**Glasgow, 1934.**

Spring cleaning found Fitz and Skye digging through dumpsters with matching eager grins on their faces. This was the time people finally threw away old things that had been sitting in some corner gathering dust, amongst them countless mechanicals and electronics. To the little boy and his orphaned friend, spring cleaning was like Christmas.

They returned to the basement of Skye’s orphanage triumphant. Fitz held the wooden box they had just salvaged closer to the lamplight, examining each knob, each hole on the surface with the keen eyes of an explorer. Skye peered over his left shoulder, a wild tangle of matted hair tickling his neck, and knocked on the box curiously. It sounded almost hollow.

“Is that a radio?” she raised an eyebrow.

He flipped the box around and declared, “Indeed it is. But I think it’s broken.”

“Can you fix it?”

“Ah, the correct question, Skye, is ‘ _when_ do I finish fixing it?’” he answered smugly.

And fix it he did. For two weeks, he wandered into shops and gathered as much information on the model as he could. He rummaged through his father’s shack and dumpsters alike to find spare parts for his radio. He missed meals and even skipped homework, spending his spare time holed up inside the dingy basement, working on the project with delicate hands like it was something sacred. Skye got bored quickly; she only dropped by to pester him to eat and drink, or to drag him back home on behalf of his mother.

She was helping the matrons tucking the younger orphans in, when he came pouncing onto her, his bleary eyes glazed over with excitement.

“It works! Oh God, it works!” he squealed, his prepubescent voice an octave too high.

They huddled over the radio with bated breath, as he plugged the headphones he had nicked from his father into a hole on the far left side. Right knob to select station. Left knob to adjust volume. The silence was ready to fracture like glass.

All they heard was static.

“Well, that’s something,” Skye remarked.

He couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or not, so he twisted the right knob over and over, desperately searching for a station, any station. He found none.

“Go to sleep, Leopold,” she said, and in this dim light her eyes were so gentle that he felt his own begin to droop. “We’ll try again tomorrow.”

He grumbled, but she had already bade goodnight. Discontented and angry at her nonchalance, he clutched the radio close to his chest and took it home with him. He tossed and turned in bed, the irritation sizzling low beneath his ribcage, and – unable to sleep – he started fiddling with the knobs again.

The nighttime silence shattered across his bedroom floor.

 _“...is the latest, and perhaps the most well-known mass extinction event in the history of the planet_ ,” a voice said.

He bolted upright in bed like his nerve endings were set on fire. The voice is English, almost feathery in timbre, but it held gravity behind its softness. Time stilled. He pressed the headphones to his ears and turned the volume up.

 _“For 150 million years, the dinosaurs roamed the Earth. But then, 65 million years ago, an asteroid left a gigantic crater on the coast of Yucanta, Mexico_ ,” the speaker went on. Fitz strained to listen, his hunger for knowledge stronger than the grainy static itself. “ _The impact created a global dust cloud that blocked sunlight for years. Plants couldn’t photosynthesize, so they withered. Herbivores starved. Carnivores starved. The temperature and oxygen level plummeted. At the same time, the Deccan Traps started erupting, and Pangea went through some sudden tectonic shifts. The combined result was the obliteration of about 75% of species on Earth.”_

She paused, and he sucked in a breath. She must have been a child still, not much older than he was, if not younger, but she was smart. For the first time in his life, he felt incompetent, and this mixture of jealousy and adoration tasted funny on his lips.

 _“But May – oh, for those who have just tuned in for the first time, May is the curator of a museum in London, and my mentor – she said I should not be afraid,”_ the girl began again, and he guessed this time she was no longer reading from her notes. _“She said I should be proud and thankful we’ve made it this far. I pondered on her words on the train ride back home, and I think they ring true._

_“My father says evolution is God’s greatest gift for us. I don’t know if I believe in God or not, but I do know I believe in the power of evolution. We start out as a single cell at the bottom of the sea. We swim and fumble until we find shore at last. Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Triassic, Cretaceous, we take them as they come. We outlive even the biggest, the strongest mammals. We learn to stand on two feet. We get so smart the brain starts folding in on itself. Nearly four billion years of constant changes, of fear and struggle, and they all lead us to this here, this now: my existence converging with yours, my voice filling your head. And we are meant to be alive.”_

The violin began to play as she finished. He knew the piece. Schubert’s _Ständchen._ He turned it down a little and pulled the blanket up. With headphones still on, he fell asleep dreaming of seagulls soaring above the never-ending sea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case anyone's curious, this is Fitz's radio http://antiqueradio.org/radiola3.htm  
> All chapter titles are taken from Franz Schubert's Schwanengesang song cycle. A piano version of the entire cycle can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OY9pZ4GNeDo


	3. Pigeon Post

**Glasgow, 1936**

News of Fitz’s patched-up RCA Radiola III rattled the neighborhood in the summer of 1934, because Fitz’s father, the local mechanic with an easy smile, couldn’t let his joy stay hidden in their tiny townhouse.  He boasted to his neighbors, he took the boy to work, he beamed and puffed his chest and clapped his hands together, proclaiming “that’s my son” as if the mesh of curly hair and bright blue eyes alone were not indicative enough.

As for Fitz, he was just happy he got to work with the machines. In 1936, the Depression was steadily declining from its peak, but it left a bitter aftertaste behind, and throwing away appliances was a luxury most could not afford. People with broken washers, old grandfather clocks, fried radios, streamed into his father’s little workshop asking for the scrawny engineer, a certain fondness fluttering in their bemused voices.

Fitz preferred to be called an engineer rather than a mechanic, something his father regarded with a frown, but he was not wrong. At fourteen, he was already a master in his work. He weaved magic into copper wires and circuits, making modifications to products that would make original manufacturers keel over in awe. He kept a sketchbook full of designs soon to be tested, like cordless telephones and radio-controlled steamboats.

“Leo,” his father began one afternoon, over the throttle of news announcers who were shouting speculations about King Edward VIII’s personal affairs.

Fitz looked up from an old Philco model he was working on.

“Suppose I am gone,” he mused. His son grimaced at the thought, but he was unperturbed. “Do you think you are man enough to take care of the house, of your mother?”

“’course I do,” Fitz huffed, affronted. “I’ve been running your workshop after school, haven’t I?”

“Yes, but I mean emotional support as well.”

At that, he hesitated. “That, too,” he answered after a beat.

“Good. I need you to be strong,” his father said. “Can you be strong, Leo?”

His lips formed a hard line, and he nodded solemnly.

Weeks passed, grim voices on the radio announced the rising tension between the UK and Germany, and Fitz’s father left home to volunteer for the Air Raid Precautions. “Stay strong, my lion man. You stay strong,” his father muttered over and over before he departed. Fitz sighed into Skye’s hair as she pulled him in for a comforting hug, and she tightened her skinny limbs around his torso.

“So now what, the man of the house?” Skye queried when they finally broke apart. “Wages and bills and food, are you ready for them all?”

“Truthfully? I just want to go to bed,” he confessed. “Adulthood can wait until tomorrow.”

She gave him a sad smile, and he turned, walking home with his shoulders hunched all the way back.

Nigh fell. He tuned in to his favorite station. For the past two years, he had kept everything a secret: the little girl on his radio with her stories like fire and her song like smoke. He didn’t even let Skye know. What he shared with this nameless girl felt too intimate, too pure – just a voice murmuring to him about the beauty of this universe, a nebulous presence that he chased across his dreams – that telling anyone about her would feel like a betrayal, an ink blot on a pristine white page.

She seemed most fond of biology and chemistry, and sometimes he found his mind adrift to the music of her voice rather than the sense of her words when she got too technical. Tonight, she talked about adaptation, and he pressed the headphones a little closer. She went on in reverie, in amazement, about all the different ways for species to change themselves, molecule by molecule, behavior by behavior, one generation to the next, in response to the undulating world, until in the end life itself willed out. The giraffe with its long neck, the duck with its webbed feet, the monkey with its social order, everything was a move in this endless cosmic chest game. Species did what they must to survive. They changed and grew and beat on against the rolling waves of life’s many demands.

“ _And that is why_ ,” she concluded, and he could hear her resolute inhale through the battered headphones, “ _I believe at the end of the day, you can make it. You have made it before and you will make it again. The world shapes you, and it’s constantly changing, so one day you will wake up to find you are not the person you were before. And it’s okay. Science says change is not a bad thing; it makes you better. You will adapt, you will catch whatever life throws at you, because it’s an instinct ingrained in your blood. Science says you are strong, and I believe you are stronger than you thought you could be._

 _“But there will come days when you think this is all too much, and it’s okay if all you do that day is sleep. Bears hibernate to avoid the winter. So drink your tea and read a book and forget the rest of the world for a while, because spring will come soon enough, and by then you will be ready_.”

 _Ständchen_ trickled into his ears, each note a velvety drop of water. He clutched the radio close to his chest, and – like an overflowing dam – he broke down crying.

 

**Sheffield, 1937**

Simmons was a lonely child. It was the price she never wanted to pay for her intelligence. She couldn’t help it if her curiosity was a ravenous thing. _Why does information cross to the opposite hemisphere in the brain, May? How can tardigrades survive without food or water, Miss Weaver? What exists beyond a black hole, Mr. Hall?_ Growing up, these were the kind of questions she would pose to any person who was willing to tolerate them. At fourteen her peers were a cocktail of hormones, of a desire to be in style and in love, and here was this kid who would always sit in the front row, hand perpetually in the air, bouncing with a million questions wanting to break free. In the end, they tended to steer clear of her.

She thought, as she spent this sunny afternoon with a scientific journal in her bedroom, that in a way, being invisible was even worse than being hated. At least by hating you people actually acknowledged your existence.

“Jemma, be honest with me,” her mother said, when it was just the two of them around the dining table, her father far away on another London trip. “Do you want me to pull you out of school?”

She stopped poking around at her baked beans and looked up. “Why?”

“You are unhappy, dear,” her mother explained gently. “Humans are social beings, isn’t that what you say on your little radio broadcast? It’s not enough to be a prodigy, you need to make meaningful connections with someone.”

“I have meaningful connections.”

“Your father and I, and the listeners of your show, whoever they are, certainly don’t count,” Mrs. Simmons sighed. “Besides, classes are too easy for you anyway. I don’t see why you should bother learning middle school knowledge.”

“I don’t think any knowledge is ever superfluous,” she bit back. “I will go to school. I will learn as much as I can. And no one, not even my peers who pretend I don’t exist, not even you, can stop me from doing that.”

Her father just laughed when her mother relayed her words to him. “I see May has taught you well,” he said over breakfast, folding his newspaper up to look at her with his fond, wrinkled eyes. Two days later, he came home late with a brand new microscope that he left by her bedside table.

The next time she came to London with him, they stayed at the museum long past its closing time, well into the night. She wandered the long and empty corridors by herself, until May came and took her to Director Coulson’s office.

Coulson was a middle-aged man with a warm gaze and a gentle, knowing smile, but he was elusive. For all her days she spent at the museum, she had only met him four or five times, always through brief moments of exchanged pleasantries. Now, she was heading to his office, the mysterious place her father always disappeared into.

When May ushered her into the room, Coulson was standing by her father, hands behind his back. “I understand you excel in class, Jemma. I’ve talked to your father, and he is thrilled by the idea. So if no unforeseeable circumstances arise,” he paused to look at her father and May, concern glazing over his eyes for the briefest of second, “how would you feel about finishing high school early and attending college in London?”

She said yes, of course, because she was a fourteen-year-old girl who dreamed of entire galaxies in her hands, and here was her opportunity to grasp at starlight at last. Coulson nodded, while her father beamed. The director turned his back to signal an end to this conversation, and May escorted her out of the room. A whole future, mapped out in the span of two minutes.

Before she left with her father, she turned to May. “I know you’ve arranged all of this,” she said, and her excited grin was so wide it made her cheeks hurt. “Thank you.”

A muscle along May’s jaws twitched in response. For May, that was a smile, and for Simmons, it was enough.

Later that week, she sat by her dormer window, and the microphone crackled to life. She talked about Galileo and the Church, about Halley’s Comet and Newton’s Principia, about knowledge rattling an ancient world built on fear. She said there was a thirst that must never be quenched because it made us fearless.

Big words, big ideas, coming from a tiny girl in her father’s attic. She spoke of them in a steady voice, and outside the window, stars seeped through the dark fabric of night to watch. They would lift her murmurs up to the sky, where invisible waves carried them to anyone out there who cared to listen. She clutched the microphone tightly like she was trying to hold on to that anyone, to share with them the uncontainable beauty she found in everything she touched, to let it run ghostly fingers up their spine, until that anyone turned into a someone. Until that someone, sparked to life.


	4. Dwelling Place

**Glasgow, December 1938**

Fitz was sprawled on the floor of his father’s workshop, breezing through his homework, when Skye came busting through the door.

“There’s a new kid in the orphanage,” she wheezed, still out of breath from her hurry to get to him.

He lifted his head and looked at her. “So?”

“He’s from Germany, Leopold. And his parents are still alive.”

The child was seven when the British government tore him from the arms of his parents, kicking and screaming, tears in his eyes. They gave him the name Donald and they placed him in an orphanage. Nobody knew what his real name was, so the matrons and their orphans just called him Donnie. He kept to himself, but if people suspected it was because of his fragmented English, they were wrong; he just didn’t like talking. He preferred the comfort of his own mind.

The neighbors threw furtive glances his way on the rare chance he left the house. Some called him a genius, others called him a Jew. Most just agreed the government used Operation Kindertransport, hiding under the guise of philanthropy, of protection of children from the Nazis, to snatch Jewish prodigies for their own ulterior motive.

A week after the orphanage welcomed its newest addition, Fitz found him on the little swing in their front yard, playing with a crumpled piece of paper.

“Hey,” Fitz ventured. The child glanced up for a second, before returning to the task at hand.

But Fitz was not one to give up easily. He scooted closer and peered over Donnie’s shoulder. “That’s an excellent design for a paper plane. Quite genius, actually.”

The child cringed slightly, and Fitz raised an eyebrow. “You don’t like it when people put labels on you, do you?” he commented.

Donnie shook his head and launched his airplane into the air. It soared and did a somersault before landing a few meters away.

“I apologize,” he said sincerely. “I just want you to know how much I love that. Although,” he mused, “you can get more distance if you bend the nose downward a bit.”

Though Donnie eyed Fitz doubtfully, he still did as said. This time, the plane ended up on the other side of the street. Fitz grinned easily, and for the first time since he first got here, the boy smiled back.

It was easy to befriend Donnie, Fitz discovered, once he had got a hold of the boy’s interest. So he took Donnie to the orphanage’s basement where he hid his inventions, those that were too unconventional to be seen in his father’s workshop. He taught the boy all the little tricks to tamper with old devices, all their fine inner workings, and Donnie listened with the wide-eyed eagerness only a child had.

Skye was not discreet with her annoyance when she found out there was a little kid running loose in their secret base, though once she found out Donnie was not there to wreak havoc, she treated him like he was her little brother. Fitz was not amused when she referred to them as her “boys,” and it was all the reason Skye needed to keep using that term until Fitz burst a vein on his forehead. She sneaked stale cookies for them while they worked, and she invented a secret coding system so they could communicate without the other kids overhearing.

Soon enough, New Year’s Eve rolled around. After Fitz had helped his mother cook and clean up, the three of them huddled round the fireplace in his living room, watching long tendrils of flame from a single burning log curl around the fire iron Skye was holding. For the most part, Fitz and Skye took turn sharing stories of those dull and lonely years in their early childhood before they found comfort in each other. When it was Donnie’s turn to speak, he could only mumble some vague answer about being isolated at school.

“Donnie, there’s no need to hide anything from us,” Skye urged. “Come on, tell us how you end up here. New Year’s Eve is for sharing.”

He let out a shaky breath. “They took my parents away. Called them criminals and put them in camps. I wanted to join them, but your people didn’t allow,” he said quietly. “If that’s what you want to hear.”

“I don’t understand,” Skye admitted.

The boy closed his eyes. When he spoke again, it wasn’t bitter; it was just monotonous. “My father is a schoolteacher. He teaches foreign language. That’s why I know English. My mother runs a corner store in the neighborhood. The Führer came to power, made life very hard for us. It’s always been hard, but this year was the worst. First he no longer allowed father to teach, then he made us change our names so we sounded more Jewish, whatever that means.

“This last November, I was asleep when the police broke into my mother’s store. They took and broke and yelled, and I remember crying in her arms as they dragged father away. A few days later, they forbade mother from running the store. They kicked me out of school. The kids there threw dirt at me and called me a ‘filthy Jew.’ We were arrested and taken to a camp where father was. You cannot imagine how much he looked like a dead man, after just a week. But then some Englishmen in uniform came and took me with them. So now I’m here.”

His eyes were distant. The fire cast a half-shadow across his face, and in this light he looked way too young and much too old.

Fitz lowered his head; he always left the Philco radio on every time he worked, so he knew what was happening in Germany. They said the Third Reich deemed Jews inferior. They said Jews weren’t allowed to run business. They said Jews couldn’t attend school with Aryans. They said a lot of things, and Fitz had a hazy sense of how awful Jewish people were treated, but here, sitting in front of Donnie, he had never felt so intimately the pain and loss they had to shoulder.

For a second, his mind flashed to the girl on his radio, and there was a sharp yearning in his chest for her to be here, to say just the right things at just the right time, because he alone could not find words eloquent enough. Then again, he doubted words could do much justice to Donnie’s suffering. So Fitz reached out a hand to grip the boy’s skinny shoulder instead.

Skye, however, launched herself at Donnie, pulling Fitz with her. The three of them crumbled to the floor, limbs entangled, laughter filtering through a mesh of hair and teeth, in what must have been the world’s strangest cuddle pile.

“It’s okay now,” Skye murmured. “You’re okay.”

“Yeah,” Fitz added. “You are.”

The boy tugged both of them closer to his chest, until the fire burned itself out and their body heat was the only thing keeping him warm. Slowly, he let out a breath, “I am.”

 

**Sheffield, September 1939**

The summer of 1939 was a time of vibrant colors, of blissful oblivion for Simmons. It was the last summer of childhood, before she went off to London for college in the fall. She was sixteen, with indefatigable feet and the gravel path with her mother’s columbine and Siberian iris simply wasn’t enough anymore. She yearned for a whole future stretching beyond the blue horizon, and as she threw pebbles into the pond in her backyard, she counted each pebble like she counted each day until she could leave.

Meanwhile, her father was away again, and lately it would be weeks until he showed up at the door, jaded and always in a foul mood.

“Did you hear,” her mother asked over supper, a week before school started, pushing the last piece of bread towards her, “the Germans invaded Poland today.”

Simmons felt a chill down her back. The wrinkles on her mother’s forehead deepened, and her heart clenched without her knowing why. She broke the bread and handed half back to her mother. _I love you_ , for some reason she wanted to say. _I won’t go to London if you need me to stay._ _I love you. We’ll be okay_.

Two days later, the war broke out.

Her father telephoned back and demanded her to stay home. She glanced at her mother, who was trying but failing to hide the tears blazing down her cheeks. Quietly, she went to her room and unpacked the suitcase.

Simmons was never the type to cry herself to sleep, but there was always a first time for everything. These were the tears for her father who was never home anymore, for her mother who bit her fingernails and furrowed her brows while she cooked, for a Britain that was cracking its knuckles to brace for cuts and bruises its people had to bear. And, selfishly, she cried for her own future, for a right to knowledge that was so viciously ripped away.

But she could not keep crying forever. So when sleep wouldn’t come for the fifth time that week, she ascended the stairs up her father’s attic in the dead of night.

“Listeners, are you there?” she whispered into the microphone. “Faceless politicians have waged war behind their desks, and we are the wounded. I am scared. I am so scared. I guess you are too.

“And while pamphlets and talk shows and old men in crisp black suits may tell you to be brave, understand that it’s alright to be scared sometimes. It’s natural. You are built with a sympathetic nervous system that either fights or flees, and if you keep pressing on, if you keep telling yourself you have to fight, imagine how desensitized you must be, how easily you will dive into your own death

“So let the parasympathetic nervous system cool you down. Go back to shore and sleep, and set sail tomorrow when the storm has eased. The sea will be there when you wake up, but if you tell yourself you’re not scared when you are, if you steer into the storm today when you’re not ready, your life won’t be.

“That said, please promise me you’ll fight when you’ve found the courage, when the time is right. Chase your treasure island at full-mast. I promise I’ll meet you there. And may the sea be kind to us.”

She gripped her college acceptance letter tightly. _One day_ , she vowed, before picking up her violin for _Ständchen._

 

**Glasgow, September 1939.**

Fitz lied awake and stared at the ceiling, a hand over his heart. “May the sea be kind to us,” he echoed the girl on his radio, listening anxiously for her violin to lull him to a numb, gray dream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When WWII broke out, the British Government started shutting down all civilian radio transmissions. Only the BBC and a few licensed radio amateurs involved in the war effort were allowed to operate. A big thank you to MarcusRowland for pointing that out to me.
> 
> I will give an explanation as to why Simmons' broadcasts are still going strong in the later chapters, but for now just bear with me.


	5. Interlude

 


	6. Atlas

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have done as much research as I could, but I am not a historian, so I apologize in advance if there are historical inaccuracies in this chapter.

**Glasgow, November 1939.**

When Fitz was born a month premature, it was his father that wept while his mother smiled. The young mechanic cradled his infant son close to his chest, his other hand clutching his wife’s. “Leo,” he declared, tears in his eyes. “Leopold Fitz. You’re going to be remarkable. Look how hard you’ve fought to be alive. You’ve earned this life, and I hope you will cherish it.”

His father watched him grow from an undersized baby to a scrawny young man, but always, always with a stout heart. When his little hands shook under the weight of a screwdriver, his father’s held them steady. When he came home with scraped knees and cut lips because he dared to fight back those playground bullies, his father bandaged him up and wiped his tears away. Fitz loved his mother, but with his father, the love was different, one that was both adoration and admiration. He disliked the name he was given, but for his father, he would do anything and be anyone.

He was Leopold Fitz, and the war took his father away.

A letter lied on their kitchen table, black ink against white paper stating the cold hard fact.

 _Air Raid Precautions this and that_.  _A landmine._

Of course there was.

_Mr. Fitz couldn’t make it._

No he couldn’t.

_We offer our sincerest condolences._

Bullshit!

Fitz tore the letter apart, and his mother echoed each rip with a strangled sob that she couldn’t let out. He held his mother like she was – _because_ she was – the only family he had left, while she drenched his shirt with hot, bitter tears. He didn’t cry, just stared off into space and let the tears flow inward, each drop like poison setting his insides aflame, until his mother stopped crying and he felt he was already dead.

Fitz was vicious when he was angry; he inflicted damage, especially on himself. He trashed the basement in the orphanage, he smashed the devices he had built, he clawed at blueprints and punched the wall until his hands were dripping with blood. It wasn’t until Skye held him back that he knew how to stop.

While Donnie cleaned up scattered electronic parts, Skye bandaged his hands. She opened her mouth and closed it many times, but she didn’t know where to start. Fitz didn’t blame her. She grew up not knowing her parents; it was a different kind of pain, like being born with a piece of your heart missing instead of being given a whole heart and having it gnawed at by some monster with sharp teeth and strong jaws.

Skye must have left a single tearstain on his shoulder when she hugged him goodbye and urged Donnie to leave, but Fitz wasn’t sure. He stayed unresponsive for a long while. Eventually, he returned home, fixed his mother a simple dinner, got her out of bed, and ate with her in silence. The evening drudged by in catatonic abandonment, and it was nearly midnight before he even noticed.

Outside his bedroom window, the street lied still beneath, longing for the bustle of daytime to fill in the aching quietude. It was the middle of November, and the tree on the front yard with its unoccupied swing bared its bony branches, empty of leaves, empty of life. He stared at it, his eyes so dry they burned. With shaky hands, he reached for his old Radiola III. The ancient headset buzzed, and the girl’s soothing voice eased into life, replacing the gnashing and howling in his head. Like salvation.

“ _Hi listeners_ ,” she began. _“May and I have been exchanging correspondence because we cannot –”_ there was a shaky breath _“– our circumstances prevent us from meeting. And today, today she wrote something that caught me off guard. It was nothing of a revelation; she simply mentioned the first law of thermodynamics in passing, but the phrase resonates. And it re-terraforms everything I’ve ever known._

_“Think about it for a moment, if you will. If no energy in the universe is created, and none is destroyed, all energy, then, is recycled energy. Hydrogen fuses at the heart of the sun and emits energy that fights its way to the photosphere and wanders until it finds a home on Earth. Plants absorb it and store it as chemical energy, so if you’re eating salad and something is stuck between your teeth, you can say that sunlight is in your smile. That energy the plant gives you, is then transformed into electrical energy that governs the neurons in your head, the very neurons that tell you to speak, to walk, to run. When you put it that way, the very act of breathing becomes a kind of miracle. You run on the energy of the cosmos, and the cosmos runs in you._

_“So that explains how our colorful existence works. But what happens in the blackness at both ends? What happens before we come to be and after we perish?_

_“Listen. I once walked to my chemistry teacher and asked him where all the elements on the periodic table came from, and all I got in return was the shaking of head.  But I needed an answer, so I turned to May. She said all the elements were just the ashes of stars. And May was not, nor will she ever be, the type to wax poetic. There are places out there in the universe, listeners, where a cosmic cocktail is mixed. All the different kinds of gas, plasma, and dust all swirl together in interstellar clouds nestled in the core of some nebula, constantly creating chemical reactions, until the cloud collapses in on itself and a nascent star is born from its death._

_“But even the oldest of stars has its time. There will come a point when the tug-of-war between its escaping gas and its gravity comes to an end, and it explodes in a spectacular grand finale. Its remains stay adrift, and if they happen to come to our solar system during its formation, then they will become a part of our planet. And our planet, gives birth to you._

_“I am sorry I go off tangent, but my point is that if you take, say, the iron in your blood and compare it to that of a wandering comet, you will find that they are the same. So are the sodium in your tears, the carbon in your cells, the calcium in your fingernails. Who’s to say your tears right now have not once rolled down Brutus’ cheeks? Who’s to say your blood has never sputtered out of Caesar’s wound? Your body is nothing but borrowed atoms that – by some random configuration – have come together to make you, you."_

She paused, but in place of silence all he heard was quiet sniffles.

 _“So don’t rage, don’t hate the universe, when it decides to take everything back,”_ she continued, her soft voice trembling and breaking at all the wrong places. The need to reach out and hold her close to his chest was overwhelming _. “All that’s borrowed must be returned. A star died to make way for something as beautiful as your birth, and you die to create something even more magnificent. They will scatter your ashes from a mountaintop, and the wind will carry you on and on, until traces of you can be found everywhere on Earth. They will bury you in a little grave up the hill, and the hill will turn greener at the touch of your pale fingertips. You will rise again in the grass, in the rain, in the dreams of people you love. While you mourn, please understand that you may be a cosmic arrangement that arises by sheer dumb luck, but you are a beautiful part of a story the universe tells. It doesn’t begin when you are born. And it will not end when you die_.”

The final word was not ended when Fitz felt something wet and warm trickle down his cheeks. It was a relief when one by one, slowly, the tears finally came. He wept for the rough, large hands that taught him the intricate wires in a circuit, for the grease-stained oversized shirt around his tiny shoulders when he was cold, for deep, rumbly chuckle on their front porch in the late afternoon sunset. He missed his father so much it pained him to even breathe out. 

On the radio, the girl was playing her violin, but this time each note was more brutally sorrowful than the last. He yearned so desperately to disintegrate, to become smoke and weave himself around the music. “Girl of fire, girl of night, you speak of science like you know where salvation is,” he breathed through the tears. “Burn me up. Take me there. Take me there and let me stay.”

 

**Glasgow/London, June 1940.**

The day Fitz finished high school was also the day he sat his mother down and told her he wanted to enlist.

“Good heaven,” she gripped the dining table. “Absolutely _not_! I’ve already lost your father. I can’t lose you too.”

“Mum, you saw what the Germans did in Edinburgh last October,” he reasoned. The front-page image of dead bodies being dragged out of a sinking ship in Forth Bridge was still burning in the back of his eyes. “What they did to the Jews, to Donnie. They _killed_ Dad, Mum.”

His mother choked back a whimper, and he took a deep breath. “I don’t want to kill anyone. I just want to do what’s right. Please let me.”

“You’re so stubborn like your father,” she sighed at last.

The officer at the enlistment office eyed him suspiciously when he approached. “How old are you?” he asked. _Talbot_ , his nametag read. The radio behind him was spewing updates from London constantly.

“Eighteen,” he lied. He wouldn’t turn eighteen in a few more months, but he was hoping they were willing to overlook that.

“Fresh out of high school, huh?” Talbot raised an eyebrow as he shifted through his files. Finally, he huffed and threw them on the desk. “Sorry lad, you’re not eighteen yet. And –” he appraised Fitz from head to toe “– I doubt you’d be of much use in combat anyway.”

Fitz was about to argue, but the radio sputtered and silenced itself. Talbot got up, slammed his fist around, muttered some colorful words, but it wouldn’t budge.

“Let me help, sir,” Fitz offered. Talbot ordered his subordinate to dig out some tools in the back shelf, and within minutes, the radio was working again. A few men waiting to be called up whistled and nodded at Fitz. The officer’s mouth formed a hard line. With the Luftwaffe flying in and out of the British Isle like it was no man’s land, the army really could use a good technician.

The day he left, Mrs. Fitz leaned against the doorframe and dabbed away silent tears behind her son’s back. Skye hugged him with a vice-like grip, burying her face in his shoulder until snot dribbled down his uniform. He did not care, and he suspected Skye didn’t, either. Donnie gave him a paper airplane he had perfected, that if he threw it just right, it would follow the wind all the way down the street.  They all bade goodbye, and he dared not look back, not even to catch a last glimpse of the lonely swing on their front yard.

In boot camp, he met a man named Hunter. Over their cold dinner in the dim mess hall, Hunter admitted he only volunteered so his family back home could have more than their rationed share of meat. “There’s no shame in showing your ribs when you’re starving, mate,” he muttered, and Fitz could only nod in response. Nobody had the moral high ground when the war hit; you did what you must to survive.

Shortly after they met, Hunter was deployed to the Royal Air Force, while Fitz joined the technicians and engineers on the ground working for the Radio Security Service. But when the first air raid struck London on the 7th of September, then on the 8th, then on the 9th, and every day after that, they knew the Luftwaffe was not going to stop. They found themselves hurled into the eye of the storm, scrambling for their lives and the lives of every person in this godforsaken city.

Fitz’s job was to modify radios, as well as to detect and report unauthorized civilian radio transmissions. It was highly stressful, and he longed for those simpler times at home, but perhaps his greatest lament was that he no longer had the chance to listen to those broadcasts from the girl on his battered Radiola III.

It was during one of those long nights that he caught her voice again amidst the groan of static. Blood drained from his face; if he reported her to Lieutenant Ward, his commanding officer, she would be arrested, imprisoned, interrogated, when he was positive she was just a girl desperately trying to hug a world in shambles close to her too-large heart.

“Private Fitz, did you detect something?” Lieutenant Ward asked.

“No, sir.”

How could he tell on her? She was just a voice, but she was all his lonely nights and all his bright mornings. She was the gramophone turntable on which he spun his dreams. So he lied. He kept the broadcasts a secret to protect her, and he took comfort in the simple fact that she was alive. Every week, he would quickly tune in, hoping to catch a brief flutter of her voice, and every week, her broadcast was there waiting for him.

Until one December night when it wasn’t.


	7. Interlude

 


	8. In the Distance

**Sheffield, December 1940.**

After the war killed her father that cold autumn morning in 1939, it pained Simmons every time she saw colors in the world.  The sun set over his grave, sunbeams trickling into the simple inscription, and in this light his headstone was a ruby glowing red against the crisp snow. It served as a cruel reminder of those train rides with him back from London, when he had bounced her on his knees and told her stories behind the snowcapped mountains, his eyes flecked with amber, when there had still been joy to be found in orange dusks and white winters.

“I miss you, Dad,” she whispered. The wind bit at her skin, and she shrunk further into her winter coat. “You said remember the first law of thermodynamics. You said the life in you lives forever. But that’s my problem: I’ve grown rather attached to the most beautiful combination of stardust the universe could’ve possibly created. That’s why I miss you. It _aches_ how much I miss you.”

After her visit to the cemetery, she carried on with her usual routine: helping her mother cook at five, dinner at six.

The red alert sounded at seven.

On the radio, government officials were frantic, pressing again and again that this was not a drill, that Luftwaffe planes were coming, that bombs were going to rain and incendiaries were going to turn the city into ash. They urged people to immediately follow blackout regulations, minimizing light to impede the vision of enemy bombers.

“It’s no use,” her mother observed, hurrying to draw the thick curtains close. “Too bright outside. There’s almost a full moon.”

She sighed, her arms full of canned food and medical supplies as she headed for their basement. “Moon or not, blackout does little to affect navigation. Bombers navigate using bodies of water and major infrastructure as landmarks. This is just to mobilize civilians and make sure we can follow orders.”

“Aren’t you a cheery one,” her mother muttered, exasperated.

They waited in silence, shivering from the basement’s winter cold, but the fear lashed out inside their chest. Simmons scooted towards her mother and hugged her close. “We’ve got each other, Mum. We’ll be okay,” she said, though the words were meant for whom, she wasn’t so sure.

About half an hour in, deep in the bowel of the dark sky came the low rumbling of airplanes as they shed altitude. Simmons’ skin turned a ghostly white from her mother’s desperate, clutching fingers. The incendiaries fell first, then the bombs. The ground was like a great beast stirring itself awake, first with slight tremors, then with loud groaning as it violently shook the sleep away. She could feel the tremble draw near, and – horror-struck – she turned to her mother.

Mrs. Simmons, whose hair was now an off shade of gray from debris and dust, only managed a wan smile. _I love you_ , her cracked lips mouthed.

A Heinkel 111 spat out its venom a few blocks away. The entire house bellowed. At last, everything flickered from view.

 

Minutes could have passed, maybe hours. Simmons did not know how long she had been unconscious; it was too dark in the basement to tell, and the pain in her head was almost unbearable. She only registered reality when she sensed a light tug on her fingers.

“Jemma,” came her mother’s whisper, weak and muffled.

“Mum!” Simmons scrambled to her feet. Part of the basement had collapsed, leaving her mother partially underneath the rubbles. A broken off beam was lodged in her torso, just a little under her heart. She coughed, splattering blood onto the tremulous darkness, her one good hand raised to beckon her daughter forward, but it was unnecessary; Simmons was already by her side in a single heartbeat.

“Oh God,” she whimpered once, before the gears clicked into place, and her gaze was frozen solid. “Stay still. Limit the damage to one region. Don’t let the beam rupture more blood vessels or perforate nearby organs. I’ll try and remove the rubbles first, then I’ll go get help.”

And she dug and dug. She clawed at shards of wood, shattered bricks, pieces of concrete, whatever she could get her hands on. Her fingers bled raw and her eyes glazed over with red, but even then, she did not stop going.

_Don’t leave me._

She lifted a concrete slab off her mother’s leg.

_I can’t lose you too._

She broke apart what was left of a shelf.

_Let’s make dinner and talk about Dad’s bad habits and laugh while the sun sets on the flowers we both grow._

A hand halted her own. “Jemma, stop. There’s nothing you can do,” her mother said. Gentle, resigned.

“No!” she cried, grabbing blindly and removing whatever she found. “Don’t say that. You’re my _mother_. There’s always something I can do for you.”

“Jemma, please let me go.”

Simmons bit her lips and continued to dig. Her mother opened her mouth to say something, but she couldn’t even start. Another bomb landed five houses down the road. There was no last word, no tearful goodbye between them, because bombs were blind, and what were sentiments shared between two lowly expendable civilians when the whole world was tearing itself apart?

Simmons didn’t know the answer, so she closed her eyes as the entire basement crumbled over her head, crushing her mother and pulling her down, down, until there was only the rubbles above and she drowned.

 

In this dream she saw her parents: her mother without a hole in her chest and her father without the tire tracks running across his torso. It was all just flashes of a long gone past: a table with three plates and three sets of utensils, a radio that sang instead of screamed, un-blackened windows beyond which columbines and Siberian irises were silhouetted against a wall carpeted with vines, a long train ride over stretches of emerald moorland and mountain ranges, a radio transmitter pointed into the waiting arms of the night sky.   

In this dream she also saw him. She could not see his face, did not know his name, but she knew that in this dream she was a white-coated scientist striding into a lab, and he was there waiting for her. They mumbled words too fast to understand, like everything was their shared secret in some distant future that right now she could not reach. He inhaled and she exhaled, mismatched but always together. He took her hand, led her away from her microscope, up a winding staircase to the roof where they danced in the moonlight. Maybe even had a glass of wine. She tugged him by the lapels of his lab coat, and her name on his lips tasted like cheap red wine but it also tasted like longing and waiting and hoping to come home at last.

_Jemma._ A kiss that missed her lips _._

_Jemma_. A kiss on the tip of her nose _._

_Jemma_. A kiss salty like tears and bitter like ash.

 

“Jemma! Can you hear me?”

Her eyelids fluttered open. “May?” she croaked.

“Oh thank God,” May breathed, but she was too busy digging through the rubbles to even appear relieved. She just looked exhausted and sad. “I hopped on a train as soon as I heard the raid was coming, but I’m a little too late.”

Past the jut of May’s shoulder, Simmons could see glimpses of the sky. Dawn was breaking, but there was a painful lack of colors. Pillars of smoke swirled upward before clawing at the sun with their ugly gray fingers. Ash and debris covered the few houses that were left standing. Up the road, someone wailed.

 Her entire house must have collapsed then, if she could see and hear everything like that. What about...

“My Mum?” she asked, but it came out almost unintelligible. Her throat hurt, her legs hurt, her chest hurt. It hurt to even be alive right now.

May’s eyes flickered to the left before she heaved a sigh. “She was the first one I found, but she didn’t make it. I’m so sorry.”

She was half-expecting to hear it. Still, it didn’t make the words any more bearable. If she had the strength in her she would scream towards the sky and cry herself into oblivion, but she hadn’t. So she settled with a single choked, desolate whimper. A pained look crossed May’s face as she tossed aside some chunk of concrete.

It was when May lifted a large column that was crushing Simmons’ lower body out of the way, that she finally realized there was something very wrong with her legs. They hurt, of course, what part of her body didn’t right now? But it was a different kind of hurt. She strained her neck to examine the damage, but May had already scooped her up and held her close to her chest. She let out a sustained groan.

“It’s alright. You’re safe now,” May murmured into her hair, her voice full of dust and ash and sunrise. “You’re safe now, Jemma.”

Simmons thought she saw May’s tears trickle down and fall on her, but she wasn’t certain. She was already succumbing to the tides of unconsciousness. Slowly, she rested her head against May’s chest and let the steady heartbeat lull her into a merciful state of not-being.

 

**London, February 1941.**

They had sawed off both of her legs from the knees down, while she had clutched May’s hand and bit down on a belt wedged between her teeth. “You’ll learn to live without feet,” they had said, and in the haze of sedative and antiseptic, she could only nod in response.

Amidst the Luftwaffe’s endless raids, it was not safe to be in London, but Simmons had no home to return to, so May took her in, gave her a little room on the ground floor with a view to the lonely, empty street. Since she could not move to a communal shelter by herself if the air raid sirens were sounded, May brought home an indoor shelter that she put in Simmons’ room. The cage-like structure was the size of a table, with a steel plate top and welded wires that together formed the four sides.

“Morrison shelter,” May said, a twinge of smugness in her expression, as she and a woman named Bobbi Morse assembled the shelter together. “It’s supposed to withstand the collapse of an entire house. It’s not introduced to the public just yet, but I have my ways.”

Simmons flashed a grin that didn’t quite touch her eyes. It didn’t slip pass May. “You’ll be alright here, I promise,” May heaved a sigh. “This house is built with modified specifications. It’s stronger than it looks. And the shelter will keep you safe.”

“It’s not that. It’s...” she shook her head and inhaled sharply. The beam through her mother’s chest was etched deep in her mind and she couldn’t get rid of it. “May, I shouldn’t be alive.”

“I watched you grow up in front of my eyes, Jemma,” May answered solemnly. “But I will not watch you die.”

She didn’t know how to respond, so she lowered her head and wheeled herself away, a million unspoken thank-yous left hanging in the air like smoke from a bombed wreckage.

While Simmons was grateful for May, she could not find it in her heart to love this new life. She didn’t exactly hate it, either; at most, she merely tolerated it. She could get around on her own just fine, since May had rearranged the house to conveniently have everything Simmons needed on the ground floor. It was the dreadful listlessness of a confined existence that she hated. She drifted from day to day without a purpose; she could not go to school or to a library, could not explore this city on her own two legs. For all the years she had been free to learn, free to wander, she was now bound to a wheelchair, trapped inside four walls of brick.

The searing pain of her parents’ death faded to a dull ache, leaving behind a crater where nostalgia came to reside. She daydreamed about a life before the war, and she saw her younger self running around the garden, a notebook poised in one hand and a microscope in the other, while her father laughed and her mother chuckled fondly. She built a world from fragmented illusions because she could not live with what was real.

May tried, she really did. She brought back pile after pile of books for Simmons, she sneaked home new museum exhibits, but dry textbook knowledge couldn’t replace experience. She couldn’t make Simmons feel the grass of her mother’s garden between her toes. She couldn’t describe the feel of gravel digging lightly into her feet. Eventually, even the books were discarded in a corner.

“You try so hard to hold on to the past, but I can’t turn back the clock for you, Jemma,” May finally said. She wasn’t angry or exasperated. She was just tired. “I can’t resurrect your parents and give you your legs back. I can’t rebuild your house and un-shatter your college dreams. I can’t go back to being the museum curator of your childhood when you now know I really am not. The best I can do is be there for you when you’re ready to start the clock again.”

Bobbi Morse sometimes dropped by. She was May’s colleague, and had also worked with her father. Her smile was kind and when she listened to Simmons talk, Simmons just knew that she _cared_.

“May told me about your radio broadcasts, Jemma,” she mused. “From what I’ve heard, you used to believe in a lot of things. You used to believe in the unlikely cosmic chance of living.”

“Yes, but then life got in the way of living.”

“Ah, but you’re alive right now. That should count as a miracle, shouldn’t it?”

Simmons could feel her shoulders start to quiver. “I didn’t _ask_ for this ‘miracle’! I was ready to die!”

Bobbi sat back, eyeing Simmons, her expression unreadable. “I think I know just what you need,” she said at last.

The next day, she came back with an old violin. “Franz Schubert. Ständchen. Play it when you need to,” she ordered and shoved it into Simmons’ hands. Then, without another word, she left.

The violin sat untouched by her window for another three months.


End file.
